Team appeared and started working out the hornpipe steps. My father – his hands steady again – was pouring everyone hits of Jesus Lethal into the bottle-cap.
The curtains around the next bed were thrown aside to reveal Coleridge in wrath at this army from Porlock that had apparently arrived. Index finger poised for the ‘off’ switch he shuffled agonizingly towards the screen, but then stopped as I froze Tommy again in that final transfigured pose. His face moved right up to Trinder’s, as if getting his scent. ‘That man,’ he said, ‘looks like a camel.’ At the volleys of laughter that greeted this he blushed, blood rushing back into his face, then smiled – his mouth widening and widening until it hit the jaw line – ‘A Bactrian.’
Those summer evenings My Hard Friend often called, to drive me back to the moors we’d walked as children. And so, that Sunday, after my usual struggle with the blank page, I heard his horn – on the last stroke of seven – sound out to save me.
‘Noddy’s come for Big Ears,’ said my wife, passing across her book, Adorno’s Minima Moralia. I read the passage she’d marked ready: ‘The refined are drawn to the unrefined, whose coarseness deceptively promises what their own culture denies’. I flicked on and riposted with another quote: ‘Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar’.
She hated him: he shrank from her like a snake from a mongoose. She said he was going to rip me off but I couldn’t see that we had anything he’d want – even our money somehow seemed to be the wrong tender. For a while she probed around – she’d heard all about English public schools’ crushes, beatings, hand-jobs in the shower – but concluded that my reversion was harmless, just one more vague disappointment: ‘He’s not exactly Le Grand Meaulnes.’
He’d got yet another car to wreck: already dented and sprayed with viridian grease, the floor shin-deep with ash, crumpled clothing and treadled maps, an arsenal of pills and bottles in the glove compartment. The tape was playing ‘Wooden Heart’ – Elvis, his hero, serenading a puppet in German, in GI Blues, made the year we were born. His hands, covered with indecipherable ink and pin prison tattoos, seemed hardly to touch the spinning wheel. He was supposed to be teaching me to drive, but we’d soon abandoned that: my arms were too long, my legs too short, my vision tunnelled in and out – whatever, I froze. From my schooldays I’d felt every word I read or wrote wasting my muscles, dulling my senses, scrambling my co-ordination – except perhaps for sex: my wife opined that only intellectuals know how to fuck.
I met My Friend on our first day at grammar school. We were the only two who reacted aggressively, moving towards each other through the white, frightened faces. My hip-throw riposted his corkscrew punch. Friends. There was something strangely familiar about the stumpy gait, the slab face with letterbox mouth and flat exiguous ears and nose, the straight or curling clumps of tow-coloured hair. We had much in common. When the boys sounded out each other’s loyalties – Beatles or Stones? United or City? – we went for Elvis – dethroned, in semi-retirement – and Park Avenue – forever at the bottom of the league. And we both hated TV, preferring the radio because the pictures were better, and loved Marvel Comics, though his favourite was The Thing, while mine was Dr Strange. We had similar scars on our foreheads, were both on council scholarships and lived near each other, in the inglorious debatable lands beyond suburbia, on the fringes of the moors.
Although in the same form, subject streaming meant that the only lesson we shared was Divinity, once a week: also allotted different lunch sittings, we hardly ever saw each other. It soon became apparent that his brute sporting potential had been noted: looking and sounding the way he did he’d had no chance. Teachers marked his work down, while opponents threw themselves under his trampling feet or ducked into his bouncers. I was classified as academic (Type 2: Arts) and slid from B to C to D team sheets. Occasionally I’d see him at break, marching by in army cadet uniform, either out of step or the only one in, while I sat on the wall puzzling over Ginsberg or Kerouac. His face was a mask of acne, crusting and cracking like an over-baked scone. Everyone laughed, but only behind his back, while I was joshingly embraced: nicknamed Professor, I had to remember to be absent-minded. I felt that there was some malevolent power – not the teachers, not even the headmaster – making everything happen. I pictured it: brown and leathery, half-cockroach, half-school satchel, lathered in sweat or spittle, dragging itself along the nocturnal classrooms and corridors, imposing by laid enchantments our scenario for the next day.
Now, parking, he ran the car’s nearside wheels into the ditch, leaving it looking stolen, used and dumped. Ignoring the stile as always, we vaulted the five-barred gate. Unseen from the road – through a curtain of aphids, past a rotting sheep carcass, beyond the sphagnum bogs and cotton-grass – was terra incognita. The forgotten south-west corner of Ilkley Moor, an expanse of thick purple heather, pathless except for the traces of our regular visits: in five months we hadn’t seen another soul. After ten minutes we entered the kingdom of the birds: hearing the peewit’s cry, like soaped hair rubbed, the plover’s resigned one-note whistle, the skylark’s scrabbling cadenza, the gabble of the red-polled grouse. The silent crows flocked with heavy emphasis from rock to rock. I realized that we were marching in step and that I’d begun to perceptibly ape his walk, like pushing through a succession of turnstiles.
It was here, the mid-point between our homes in Eldwick and Hawksworth, that we used to meet on Sundays, to sidefoot a dented football to and fro. We never talked about school – communicating mainly in the catchphrases of the various comic foreigners and sexual deviants from the radio show, ‘Round The Horne’, and the clipped, pained dialogue of its interminable ‘Brief Encounter’ parody. ‘I know’…‘I know you know’…‘I know you know I know’…‘I know you know I know you know’…‘Yes, I know’. Oblivious to the flora and fauna, we watched the progress of our divergent metamorphoses, as if we were the mirrors in which we could still glimpse ourselves as we really were.
At sixteen he took his anger and acne off to the army. I left two years later for the first of a busted flush of universities. On my Christmas visits to my parents I’d hear news or rumours: his three tours of Ulster, his dishonourable discharge, his mercenary wanderings followed by monstrous if shadowy criminality. I had no doppelgänger dreams or Corsican Brothers flashes, just the feeling that he could have been here and I could have been there. When I finally returned to the area, having got tenure at Leeds, I discovered that he was ‘away at the moor’ – not Ilkley but Broadmoor.
I met him again when I sprawled my bike and myself across the icy cobbles of Haworth Main Street. He burst out of The Fleece and lifted me up, straightened my handlebars and drew me inside. How had he known me, chubby and balding after these fifteen years? He hadn’t changed at all, apart from the acne – a gargantuan toddler, dented and striated. The fingers of his right hand were bandaged together in a complex cat’s cradle. There was a second pint of Ram Tam by the fire, as if I’d been expected.
He seemed to know everything that our contemporaries – whose names mostly meant nothing to me now – were doing, while giving the impression that he wasn’t particularly interested. He’d even heard about my upcoming book on the French sentimentalists. When I asked what he was up to he just smiled: ‘This and that, here and there, now and then.’
We’d thrown the bike in the back of his van and gunned over to the moor. As he led me across the frozen ground I discovered something new, his love of nature: ‘I get up here as often as I can. Watch the birds come and go, the heather change colour. Whatever it’s doing in the valley it never seems to rain on the tops’. Every time we followed this same four-mile circuit, always ending up in The Midland in Bingley, which had ‘Suspicious Minds’ on its jukebox.
He wouldn’t let on where he was living but finally, reluctantly, gave me a Keighley telephone number: ‘You might be able to leave a message for me there.’ In fact, the few times I used it he himself answered on the second ring. One night I saw him on Leeds Headrow with two floridly-dressed Asians: he didn’t speak, just looked straight through me. Whatever he did, I suspected